Sunday, October 26, 2003

Zbigniew is thinking of software mediated social networks as routing map for dynamic information. A bit like the way I've been calling the blogosphere, the "flow internet".

Jason is wondering how to use this for permission marketing. To send certain kinds of marketing messages via the social network.

So I ask, will the routing logic be by type of message or type of person. And who decides? Do I decide for myself, or for the people I link to?

I think Jason is thinking of "message type routing".

But I suspect that this will lead to the usual permission marketing problem. Marketing is "interrupt" by definition. Surely if I have the choice I'll simply choose not to receive adverts ...

But then I start going off in this direction ...

If I filter out begging letters, but I have a friend who sends one. And another friend who is open to receive them. Should the message be passed via me to the second friend? Or is my stated lack of interest also taken to be *filter* for my downstream friends?

How does control over this affect my value on the network? To make a weblog comparison. I may read the weblog of person X because he's both a window on a particular scene, but ruthelessly not interested in one aspect of it. So I know that by reading his blog I really get a filtered view.

If there are fine grained filters on this sort of message routing in software mediated social networks, I may sign up as "knows by reputation" person Y, precisely because I want to take advantage of his filter properties.

Hmmm ... maybe there's even a business model where person Y can *sell* a kind of aquaintanceship that relies on his advanced filter settings.